Preface

Learn how to use OpenCV to develop vision-aware, intelligent Android applications in a step-by-step tutorial and join the interesting and rapidly expanding field of computer vision to enable your Android phone to make sense of the world.

Starting from the basics of computer vision and OpenCV, we'll take you through all the ways to create exciting applications. You will discover that although computer vision is a challenging subject, the ideas and algorithms used are simple and intuitive, and you will appreciate the abstraction layer that OpenCV offers in order to do the heavy lifting for you.

Packed with many examples, the book will help you understand the main data structures used in OpenCV, and how you can use them to gain performance boosts. Next, we will discuss and use several image processing algorithms, such as histogram equalization, filters, and color space conversion. You then will learn about image gradients and how they are used in many shape analysis techniques, such as edge detection, Hough line transform, and Hough circle transform. In addition to using shape analysis to find things in images, you will learn how to describe objects in images in a more robust way using different feature detectors and descriptors. Finally, you will be able to make intelligent decisions using machine learning, specifically, the famous adaptive boosting learning algorithm and cascade classifiers.